


Soulboned

by Thorne



Category: Men's Hockey RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: Hershey Bears, M/M, Soulmates, Washington Capitals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-07-20 12:27:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16137242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thorne/pseuds/Thorne
Summary: On one of the long bus rides back to Hershey earlier this year, Karl was so goddamn bored that he actually calculated how many hours in a given year he's spent and is currently spending with John—"with John" is defined as within 200 feet, or regulation North American rink length—and realized that even taking NHL call-ups, World Juniors, and other factors into account, he's already spent more time with John than he has any of his previous girlfriends, which is… something, all right.





	Soulboned

**Author's Note:**

  * For [daddyoshie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/daddyoshie/gifts).



The thing about playing hockey for a living is that being in some kind of low grade discomfort all the time is just part of the deal. The ache from taking a hit on the boards, a since-healed joint that doesn't click quite naturally, bruises wherever the padding doesn't pad quite enough, the headaches that can come out of nowhere for the guys who've got concussions in their history—it's part of the package. To say nothing of the different kind of pain that rolls around for almost everyone at the end of the season, whenever that happens to be. The earlier it happens, the worse it is, and it sticks around longer.

The thing about playing hockey for a living for the Bears, and then later for the Capitals, is that he figures out early on that the Caps have plans for him and John, and they heavily involve each other. John gets drafted the year right after him, and they're apparently already earmarked for each other as soon as they're both out of juniors, based on their complementary skill-sets, handedness, development paths, and (fortunately) chemistry. On one of the long bus rides back to Hershey earlier this year, Karl was so goddamn bored that he actually calculated how many hours in a given year he's spent and is currently spending with John—"with John" is defined as within 200 feet, or regulation North American rink length—and realized that even taking NHL call-ups, World Juniors, and other factors into account, he's already spent more time with John than he has any of his previous girlfriends, which is… something, all right.

The thing about playing hockey for a living for the Bears, and then later for the Capitals, and being hitched next to John in their shared journey down the road with both teams is that knowing exactly where John is on the ice all the time is something that he's been conditioned to know for the better part of his career, and if it extends off the ice, that's also to be expected from the sheer amount of time they spend together. John's his partner. John's the closest thing he has to a brother. John's his best friend. They eat, sleep, and train together; they room together on the road and at camp; they live in the same apartment building; they drive to the games together; they ride the bus together.

So. Whenever he's _not_ playing hockey for a living, whenever the season ends, Karl's used to pain, and not used to not having John in his vicinity every waking moment of the day.

Partly, it’s just routine. He spends the majority of the year doing his best to imprint routines and permanent muscle memory in his mind and body. Most of that involves John, so it just makes sense that the off-season's deviation from the norm is going to throw him. It takes him at least a month into the off-season before he doesn't automatically look around for John every time he sees something funny online he wants to share from his phone, or stops accidentally putting John's coffee order in with his when he's out grabbing breakfast in the morning, or doesn't ask the empty passenger seat of his car to look up the traffic where they're going.

He spends time with his family. He trains. He gets massages. He jerks off. He does the weird visualization exercises the trainers swear by. Sometimes he takes ibuprofen. He tries to stay away from the hard stuff unless he really needs it, and he has Ambien if necessary, but everyone knows someone who's gotten hooked, and Karl doesn't want that to be him. From May to September, he just takes it for granted that he'll miss John, and he'll have some small hurt nestled in him somewhere: a slight ache under his ribs, maybe, or a sense of pressure at the back of his head and his temples, or a knot between his shoulders he can't quite reach on his own.

He doesn't put them together at first, and maybe he never would have had to if not for the 2010 Calder playoff run with the Bears. Because that was the trigger, Karl thinks. It got started before that, and it'll be a while before he figures shit out, but that was when they lit the fuse for real.

It's no one's _fault._ It's just what happened. Maybe it was always supposed to happen, but of course they had to do it in the most dumbass roundabout way possible.

Yeah, that seems about right.

***

"Alzy, are you going to throw up?"

That is definitely not in Karl's immediate plans and he feels like he should tell Jay this, but he also feels like he should continue to lie on this very comfortable floor and enjoy the way the ceiling is slowly swirling without actually moving. That's fucking amazing. That's the deep poetry of the universe, or something.

It's closer to morning now than night; the party's long since moved out of the locker room, out to the (admittedly limited) club scene, and now back to Bryan Helmer's place.

"I'm asking because I need to know whether to roll you on your side or not, because it's cool we won and all that, but if you choke and drown in your own puke or a puddle of bulk rate champagne, next season is probably gonna suck at least a little," Jay continues. He frowns. "You do roll people on their sides, right? I think so. Shit. Maybe I should ask Perry."

"I'm good," Karl manages to say. "No puking."

He's not going to puke. He feels amazing. They fucking won the Calder Cup on their home fucking ice, and Karl scored, and John scored, and the team set a bunch of records, and he's drunk a lot of the bulk rate champagne which Jay shouldn't be shitting on because that's _their fucking champagne for winning back to back championships_ , and also this floor is extremely comfortable and smells good, both of which are pleasant surprises. It's not the playoff championship he wanted—it's the lesser of the two, but the fact that the AHL's the lesser doesn't mean so much as that the AHL's all that's available.

For now, anyway. Nothing hurts and everything is awesome.

"If you do, Carly's gonna kill you," Jay warns. "Or maybe you'll kill him. And then next season will _really_ suck."

It's not gonna suck, though. They've won, and they're probably moving up to the Caps full time, if all the comments from Bruce Boudreau and George McPhee and Coach French are true. Karl and John, and hopefully Jay and Matty P and Neuvy and all the teammates Karl loves very much and is vaguely sure he's informed them of that multiple times over the past couple hours.

"Carly's my boy," Karl tells Jay, because he is. "He's not gonna kill me."

"He will if you puke on him or crush him to death like you are right now," Jay says, and oh. _Oh_. That's why the floor is comfortable and smells so good. Karl decides he's still fine with where he is.

From directly beneath him, John says, "I'll kill you if you puke on me." He doesn’t sound too out of breath though, so Karl doesn't think he's really crushing him. They're practically the same height and weight. This is significant. Karl should tell John that. Instead, he pets John's hair, and John makes a pleased, if muffled noise.

"Okay, you're on your own," Jay says. "You can get your own beers."

"Beer," Karl says, and then keeps chanting, "Beer! Beer! Beer!" until the whole room picks up the chant and people start spraying each other with beer (Helmer bellows in rage, since they're in his house's finished basement and not in the locker room anymore) and hugging again. Karl lets the splatter fall on him, waving one hand in the air and laughing. After a while, Gordo wanders over and does give him two bottles of beer and, holy shit, a bag of ketchup potato chips.

"I want chips," John demands, and Karl obligingly shifts enough so that they can both sit up and go to work on the bag.

Someone's attached their phone to some speakers and is blaring music; a bunch of the team is clustered around the videogame consoles at the television; there are more people draped over furniture, walking in and out with drinks. Aucoin's telling a story to Giroux that involves a lot of expansive arm gestures and he's already accidentally gotten even more of his beer on Helmer's floor. The music switches to "Party in the USA" and Neuvy starts singing along, impressively on key but in a completely different language, while Holtby pretends to play air-guitar next to him. Karl sits there, leg to leg with John, and feels warm and joyful and content while John rates the playoff beards of every single person in his line of vision.

"Perry's makes him look like one of those guys that trains monkeys to pickpocket people," John says through a mouthful of chips, spraying crumbs everywhere.

"Huh. It kinda does," Karl says after staring over at Matty P. "That seems kinda racist though."

John shrugs. "Helmer looks like the grizzled vet in the war movie who does the big moto speech near the end and jumps on the bomb to save everyone else," he says, and takes a swig of beer. "And Neuvy looks like someone decided he was going to be the Dread Pirate from the Princess Bride movie for Halloween, like, two weeks ago and used that as an excuse not to shave."

"Holts," Karl says, pointing.  

"Shit, Holts just looks like some Civil War reenactment actor who let his muttonchops get out of control," John says.

"Yours makes you look like a shady Amish meth dealer," Karl tells John. He reaches out and pokes John's cheek. "Super patchy."

"Fuck you," John says amiably. He squints at Karl. "You look like a lumberjack. Like a metro lumberjack."

"I'll take it," Karl says, and takes a swig of his own beer.

"Alzy," John says, leaning in like he's about to tell him a secret, "We fucking _won_."

"We fucking won!" Karl yells, and everyone else in the room takes up the chant just like the beer one, and John leans his head against his shoulder. "I don't think I can drive," Karl admits to John's hair.

"Beags will drive us," John says, after thinking about it for a good minute of silence.

"Nope," Jay says cheerfully, plopping down next to them. "I'm drunk. Anyway, Helmer called a bunch of cabs for anyone who doesn't crash here, so if you want to go, I guess we can all go now. I think he's kicking us out."

Getting home is a comfortable blur. The sun's already peeking up golden over the horizon; it's a whole new day. Karl is vaguely aware of Helmer and Boyd Kane being responsible and all adult and pouring the three of them into a cab. Helmer gives the driver the address of their apartment building, and pulls the money out of Karl's wallet in advance.

"Good job," Helmer tells all three of them. "Go to bed when you get home. Don't drink anymore. See you guys in a day."

"Okay, Dad," John says, and gets gently smacked upside the back of his head for it, though Karl's not sure if John was joking or not. Helmer just exudes Dad Strength; he looks like he's constantly thinking about replacing furnace filters, or adjusting his deductible, or some shit like that.

They manage to pay the driver without issue, and after a lot of fumbling and Jay dropping his key fob in the bushes twice, they even manage to get inside the apartment building. Karl's apartment is the closest, and he staggers in with John right behind him. Jay comes in only long enough to rummage in Karl's fridge and steal his last bottle of blue Gatorade like a lowdown fucking thief, before sidling right back out again.

"You can stay," Karl offers, leaning out into the hall and keeping his voice down low since it's like five in the morning, while also trying to get close enough to get the Gatorade back. "You can have the couch."

"Pass," Jay says, keeping well out of range. "You can spoon Carly all you want but I want my own bed." He twists the top off and chugs half the Gatorade in three long swallows. "See you tomorrow."

"Yeah, okay," Karl says, unable to stop smiling. "Hey. We won."

"We won," Jay agrees, grinning back.

"WE FUCKING WON," John yells from inside the apartment, and Jay books it down the hall while Karl swears and hastily closes the door before the neighbors can come for their heads.

"Dude, keep it down," Karl says. He locks the door, kicks off his shoes, and makes his way into the bedroom where John is already collapsed on his bed. "Move over, Jesus. What are you, an animal? Take your shoes off."

"My buzz is gone, it's a bad buzz now," John says mournfully, and then he sighs when Karl flops down next to him. "Oh, it's okay now. It's fine."

Karl's head was buzzing a little too, but now that he's on the bed, he feels fine. He's sobering up, but he's also coming down from the adrenaline crash, though it's not so bad. He must still have some endorphins pumping through his system. He wonders if it'd be worth the colossal amount of energy he thinks it would take to drag himself to the shower for his second one (or third, if you count all the beer) of the night, and then decides that it's not, since John's not making any moves off the bed and Karl doesn't feel up to forcing him. They might as well both be horrible, beer-sticky wrecks of human beings together. He can do laundry tomorrow.

Still, he shouldn't sleep like this. Karl thinks should take off his pants at least, but he's not sure of the optics of that while John's still dressed. But it's his bed, so that shouldn't matter; he should be able to set the rules.

"Don't make this weird, but I'm taking my pants off," he announces, and starts working on his belt.

John just grumbles and starts fumbling at his own fly. Karl gets his pants off and watches in entertainment while John gets hung up on the obstacle of still having his shoes on. For a minute or two, it seems like he's not going to be able to coordinate pants over shoes; there's a lot of struggling, and this night could end with Karl calling Helmer in a panic because John's concussed himself falling off Karl's bed. But eventually he kicks free and then goes for his shirt. Karl decides _he's_ not going to be the most dressed person in his own bed, and also yanks his shirt off.

Then there's a slightly awkward pause where he thinks they're both realizing neither of them is as drunk as they were before.

"My beard's not _that_ bad," John says out of nowhere, turning on his side to face Karl.

"Whatever, it's fine," Karl says, and waits just a few beats to get his timing perfect. "You know, for a fourteen-year-old girl."

This is the sort of thing that usually leads to one of them getting punched and then maybe a wrestling match, and yes, maybe Karl has some ulterior motives here, but he honestly doesn't expect John to smirk, do a crotch-thrust (okay, both of those things he could have expected, but _then_ ), reach out, grab Karl's hand, and jam it partially down his underwear, while saying, "You sure about that last part?"

Someone could still get punched. It could still be a wrestling match. They might still be a little drunk. Instead, Karl pushes his hand in deeper and grabs John's dick for real, which should feel weird but it doesn't. It just feels like a dick: warm, slightly sticky, the soft give of skin over the hardness beneath, coarse hair scratching against the side of his hand. There's a quip here that he could do; there's some kind of comment he could make about pubes and John's beard, and then he could let go, and then maybe they'd be able to laugh it off or pretend to be suddenly drunk enough to pass out or just never mention it again.

Instead, Karl strokes it and rubs his thumb up and down to feel the way the skin moves under it. John sucks in a gratifyingly shaky breath and rolls himself right up against Karl, so it seems like the best thing to do is shove his face against John's neck and lick it, tasting sweat first, secondhand beer under that, and the bitter chemical ghost of whatever cologne John threw on after the post-game shower before the night's festivities got underway. He inhales, mouths at it, and licks it again while both John's hands fumble their way into Karl's underwear and it feels so fucking _good_ ; someone else's hand is always so much better than his own. It's so close to what they've done in the past, rolling around on the floor or bed, or using a ball-tap as one of those stupid bro signs of affection, but _not_.

It takes more squirming for them to both get comfortable and into positions where no one's arm or leg is too awkwardly pinned, and then to shove the last few pieces of their clothing up or down. Neither of them wants to let go completely, and it feels good, not just his dick but any part of his body that John touches or presses against him, and John keeps making these shaky, shallow little panting breaths, open-mouthed against his skin whenever Karl jerks his dick or touches him in return. They don't talk, they just touch.

The darkness of his bedroom, courtesy of the finest blackout curtains Ikea has to offer, works both for and against him; he's not sure they'd be doing this in daylight, but he wants to see everything right now. He's seen John completely naked before: in the locker room, hotel rooms on the road, that chili dog incident in the middle of their first rookie camp together that they've mutually agreed never happened. But never like this, spread out against Karl's own dark blue sheets, in Karl's bed, squirming and panting and hitching a leg over Karl's hip.

John has good hands; he knows when to squeeze and when to go lighter, and he scratches the edge of his thumbnail across the slit of Karl's dick, smearing wet all over the head. Karl tries not to come right then. He mirrors that touch back at John and has a fleeting thought about handedness that makes him want to laugh, so he does, open-mouthed against John's throat which makes John squirm and do it again, and so Karl does it back, and he shudders with how good it feels.

John's eyes are wide; John's mouth is slack. Karl has to touch it and he strokes his fingers blindly over that stupid beard, across his cheek and between John's lips, and when John closes his mouth around it and swirls his tongue over Karl's finger—his _finger,_ for fuck's sake—that does it. Karl makes a noise that will be extremely embarrassing in his memories later but his entire body jerks and he comes messily all over John's hand, and from the feel of it, John's doing the same thing into Karl's fist.

Distantly, Karl knows he should be worried about this, but somehow he just can't care or worry. He feels too good. Not just with coming, but everything—just something that feels like a deep glow inside him, like this is the only and best thing he should be doing, right now, exactly this, with John. The _rightness_ of it is all he can focus on, and he lets himself slip into it, and feels John doing the same thing. He feels John. He doesn't know how, but he does, and knows John's feeling the same thing.

It shouldn't be this easy; it shouldn't feel this right, but he lets himself go with it. It feels like falling into the deepest, best sleep of his life, and he's aware of John with him, him with John, and both of them going down into it together.

***

When he wakes up, there's much brighter light creeping in along the edges of the window, and it feels like they've slept until late in the afternoon. Karl waits for agonizing embarrassment and/or awkwardness to kick in, not to mention disgust over how they both smell like the floor of a bar. His mouth doesn't taste much better.

But all he feels is… good. It sounds so simple and stupid, but he just feels _good_ , filled to the brim with perfect hazy gold contentment and not even hungover.  When he looks down, John is looking up, also awake, and he's smiling.

Karl smiles back helplessly. "Hey," he says.

"Hi," John says.

He's going to kiss John. He's going to kiss John in sober broad daylight with his gross-tasting mouth, and John's also-probably gross-tasting mouth, and John's terrible facial hair that looks _endearing_ right now, even though they're teammates and friends and this can no longer be classed under "heat of the moment playoff win sex" and therefore looked past. And Karl _absolutely does not care_ ; he could have his parents and teammates and the entire combined front offices of the Bears and the Caps and even Gary Bettman standing in his bedroom and telling him he really doesn’t need to potentially complicate his career like this, and kissing John would still be the best idea anyway.

And then someone coughs loudly.

Karl whips his head around so fast that he gets one of those hot, rubbery flashes of pain in his neck. Jay's let himself back into Karl's place in the morning, presumably to steal more Gatorade, and is shamelessly looking into the bedroom.

He raises an eyebrow at Karl. "Yeah, see, this is why I don't crash on your couch. Holy shit, guys, open a window in here before we all die."

Karl chucks a pillow at him, and then when he realizes that Jay's got his orange juice carton and he's drinking directly out of it, gets out of the bed and charges him. That's the plan, anyway, if he hadn't had his underwear still tangled around his knees, tripping him up and causing him to stumble. Jay makes an inarticulate spluttery noise through the orange juice, throws the carton at him (John yelps; Karl thinks he caught some orange juice in the eye), darts across the room and holes up in Karl's bathroom before Karl can reach him.

"What the fuck, Beags!" Karl yells, banging on the door. He can hear Jay laughing through it, and John laughing from the bed, and even Karl's laughing, though he keeps on banging.

"Dude," John says, still wheezing. "Dude, no, hang on, I have a better idea."

He throws the sheet off himself and _John_ apparently managed to get his underwear off in the night, because Karl gets the full uncensored view and his brain instantly short-circuits. Karl makes an about-face for the bed, but John shoos him backwards, back towards the bathroom.

"I'm gonna blow you up against the door," John announces loudly. "And then Beags is gonna buy breakfast for us afterward, if he wants us to let him out of the bathroom."

"It's three in the afternoon, dumbasses!" Jay says from within the bathroom. "Oh my God, don't, seriously, don’t make me a part of your weird sex games, seriously. I'm sorry! I swear!"

"A really big breakfast," Karl agrees. "We can go to that diner that does the all day one."

He lets his head settle back against the bathroom door with a clunk and leans back harder when he feels Jay start kicking the bathroom door.

"Pancakes," John says. "Bacon. Eggs." He drops down to his knees. "Diiiiiiiick," he says loudly to the door. "Part of a balanced breakfast."

If this really happens, Karl is possibly going to kiss John after this and get to taste an even more horrifying combination of both dick and morning mouth after this, and he couldn't be more embarrassingly eager for it.

"Serves you right for stealing my juice, Beags," Karl says. And then he almost falls backwards and cracks his skull when Jay yanks the door open and explodes out of the bathroom, a bath towel draped over his head to cover his eyes as he blunders by to escape. John grabs Karl around the waist and steadies him, and Karl grabs the door frame as well.

"Well, fuck, I didn't even get to the next part. I was gonna play 'Trapped in the Closet' on my phone while we did it too," John complains.

"Does that make Beags R Kelly?" Karl says, then frowns. "Wait. Who are we in this scenario then? Are you the wife? Does that mean you and Beags are together then?"

"You're overthinking it," John says. "It was just for, like, general mood and atmosphere."

"I refuse to be R Kelly!" Jay yells from the other room. "I'm not any of your stupid rap music stuff!"

"You owe us pancakes, asshole!" John yells back and gets up. "Ugh. I need to shower."

He might not be getting a blowjob right at this second, but John saying _us_ gives Karl an unexpected little thrill, and then he gets an even stronger pulse of it when John brushes against Karl's bare hip as he walks by. Not even Jay's horrified shrieking when John marches into the living room to get the towel back makes it go away, possibly because Karl stares at John's ass every step of the way.

He just feels so _good._ Maybe he shouldn’t, because this could be dangerous. It's just a little thought, barely tickling at the corner of his mind. Karl pushes it away. He'll deal with this later. Right now, he's hungry and they're winners.

***

Everything moves quickly after that.

Hershey has their breakdown day, and they keep the Calder Cup celebration going. Karl's getting back home later than usual this year. He dawdles with his packing, taking the time to get everything put away in more order than he normally would instead of throwing everything into boxes to be shipped or driven home. With luck, he's not coming back here at all. It makes him nostalgic, but a little superstitious as well. It's a small ache, but a real one.

When there's no more reason to delay and he finally has his car packed to the brim, he still puts it off just one more day with the excuse he wants to leave on the weekend. Almost everyone's gone now, and he's said his goodbyes to teammates scattering all over the place. He's had his conversations with the brass for both Hershey and the Caps; he knows when he's due back in Washington for camp and the fan convention and everything else. They've told him he should probably look into apartments there. John got the same spiel. John's packed as well, and he's lingered just as long as Karl, even though his drive home will be much shorter than Karl's. They've helped each other pack, and they've helped each other load, and they've spent each night of the week in the same apartment, the same bedroom.

They haven't talked about it at all after that first day. (Jay did end up buying them breakfast, though he bitched about it for twenty minutes straight and made a point of ordering a dinner entree instead of breakfast.) They don't talk about it at night, either. They just keep hanging out in the increasingly bare apartment and carrying on as normal, and then at night…

It's okay as long as it's in the dark, with the door closed. It's okay as long as it's the off-season. It's okay as long as they don't actually talk about it, even if it seems like something they really should talk about.

Karl knows he has enough issues about superstitions bordering on OCD that would send any sports psychologist into a wheezing fit. But just like when there's a winning streak, Karl's reluctant to do anything differently, and all things considering, his brain's basically turning off as soon as they touch, or at least relocating to more southern locations. So far, they've kept it to hand jobs and rubbing off against each other, though the former's caused Karl to run completely out of his biggest bottle of Kiehl's, and the latter's been enthusiastic enough that John's wall has dents in it from his Ikea bedframe and his neighbor has viciously thumped the wall back in retaliation twice.

But finally, there's no reason to stick around Hershey anymore, and his parents are sending more and more pointed texts to him about when he'll be getting home. It's the last day. Karl's finally put the last box in his car, and now he's packed and ready to go, and they still haven't said a word to each other about whatever the fuck they're doing.

"Gonna try to drive it in two days or stretch it out?" John asks.

Karl shrugs. "Depends, I guess. If I see anything cool. I always tell myself I should check more places out."

"Send me pics," John said. "Only good pics, though. See if you can find that giant ball of twine."

"Hey, I sent you the alligator rodeo sign last time," Karl says.

"You didn't even pose with a gator, though," John says. "How can you stop for a gator rodeo and not wrestle one?"

"Yeah, whatever," Karl says. "Like you're any better."

John is, though. When he was up with Caps at the start of March, almost a full two month stretch, Karl got a daily barrage of texts about everything he saw, including but not limited to pictures of the sunset from his hotel's roof, the designs the local barista kept putting in his latte foam, the fancy toiletries at the road hotels, OOOTD (Ovi Outfit Of The Day, and sometimes the literal lack thereof; Karl made the mistake of opening the first of those at breakfast and accidentally snorted orange juice through his nose), interesting dogs, and the occasional drunk dick pic.

"Let me know when you get in safe, though," John says. He smiles a little, even if it's not in his eyes. "It'll suck if I have to break in a new d-partner."

 _Just come with me_ , Karl thinks of suggesting for the hundredth time. _We can do a roadtrip. No one will think it's weird, since we're friends; no one will care if we take our time to do it or eat McDonalds every day for lunch. We can start our training in July. We can stop at any stupid roadside stand you want, take pictures of anything. We can do all the cliché stuff like watch the sun rise at the Grand Canyon, and if you want, we can make out during it. We can stay in crappy motels where no one knows or gives a shit who we are. Hey, is this ending? Are we going to keep doing this? Should we talk about this?_

He doesn't say any it, even though he wants to. If he does, he might get answers he doesn't want.

"Excuse you, I was here first. If anyone got broken in, it was you," Karl says instead. And oh, that's not the right thing to say for a couple reasons, not the least being that the concepts of _John_ and _broken in_ are making his dick twitch in new interest.

"Well," John says, and punches his arm lightly. "Drive safe, buddy. Talk to you soon."

"Yeah," Karl says. They shuffle in place briefly, and then Karl decides _fuck it,_ and goes in for the hug, though he hedges his bets and goes one-armed in case John wants to play it that way. But John steps right into him and grabs him with both arms, so Karl wraps the other arm around him like he'd meant to do it all along, and shamelessly takes one last whiff of him, breathing him in deep.

They both let go at the same time. John steps back, and Karl gets into his car. He starts it, puts on his sunglasses, waves, and rolls down the window.

"See you later," he says. John just nods.

Karl drives away and doesn't let himself look back. He regrets it for every mile to Burnaby.

***

It's good to be home at first. The high of winning lasts for a while; he wakes up each morning and he's happy about the Calder Cup, even if it's not the real Cup. He can feel proud of it, but there's still that pang about the NHL playoffs.

But after about a week or two, he feels uncomfortable in his own skin, itchy and restless. He'd figured on at least three weeks of down time before getting back to regular training, but he finds himself hitting up the gym when he can't sleep and back on the ice sooner than expected.

The longer he's been at home, the more he's become uncertain about everything that happened, and whether his memory is what's at fault or if it's something else. He and John still text every day, and it's just like before, the usual stuff they used to talk about. Giving each other shit about their workout routines and updates on who they're practicing with, Karl finally getting around to seeing the _Iron Man 2_ movie, the set of golf clubs John's dying to buy, and the little details that thread their way through everyday life. He finds himself saving them up for John, trying to figure out the most interesting way of telling them to him. He thinks over everything he says, evaluating how John might take it, what other conversation it might open up.

He should just talk to John, for real. They should just have The Conversation. Except he knows what the conversation needs to be, the question for both him and John: _What do you want?_

And he doesn't know the answer yet. Or how he'd handle John's answer, depending on what it was.

Next season is a big one, anyway. It's not just about living in Washington full time; he's going to do whatever it takes to get himself cemented into the Caps' top four. There's the Winter Classic coming as well.  McPhee hadn't gone into specifics, but he'd made several cryptic comments about being prepared for "unusual media access" which could mean nothing more than not giving any quotes that'll contribute to the expected narrative upswing about how a team that shattered a bunch of franchise records managed to pull off such an underwhelming playoffs, or could mean they're getting some kind of documentary made about them. It's hard to tell with McPhee.

It had put him on edge, a little. He'd done his meetings with French and Yingst first, then ended up having to talk to McPhee as well, since he'd missed the Caps breakdown day because of joining the Bears for their run. After the vague comments about the media access, McPhee'd mentioned the Hockey Diaries project that Karl was a part of and Karl has no fucking clue if he should read nothing or everything into that.

 _Does McPhee scare you sometimes_ he texts John during a break on one of his workouts. He's barely put the phone aside when it pings again.

_Fuck yeah_

_Its the way he just stares when he's talking. he doesn't blink_

_Like worlds most disappointed dad if you fucked up but also if your dad was a gangster_

_Like he's prolyl ok but he has real murder eyes_

Karl snorts. _I feel like he says things that could mean stuff but i don't know if they do or not_ , he texts back.

 _???_ John texts.

 _Not important. just weird_ , Karl responds, and then puts the phone down and gets back to doing squats. By the time he lets himself take a break again, John's responded with an _ok whatever_ and then a picture of McPhee from some hockey blog that has his head photoshopped onto Scarface's body.

There's no way McPhee knows that Karl's done with John—which isn't even anything wrong, just… complicated, probably. Only Jay knows, and Jay's a big believer in minding his own business. Jay's the most determined and hardest working player Karl's ever met, and he's willing to push himself until he pukes blood if it'll get him to the NHL full time but it's all self-directed. Karl's never gotten even a hint of the idea Jay would throw someone else under the bus to make that happen.

And he's a friend. Karl trusts him almost as much as he trusts John. Not quite as much, because anyone who's that stubborn about just getting a goddamn smartphone and refuses to learn how to text on general principles deserves at least some side-eye. But in a way, that's a feature, not a bug. He sure as hell never needs to worry about Jay letting something slip on social media.

Karl's pretty sure most of the people he plays with wouldn't do something like to him or John, probably. And even if they did—unless someone catches him on film with his dick out with another player, he could deny it. He could even double down, embrace it, and dare the league to weather the potential public relations shitstorm of it, though that'd be riskier. No matter what his ambitions are, he can't kid himself about where he is in the hierarchy of the NHL, he's no superstar or even just a regular star, and he probably never will be. Karl's not Ovechkin. He's not even Greenie. He could get sent down and never come back up; no one's going to miss a defensive defenseman like him, unless he flips a switch somehow and starts putting up ridiculous offense numbers.

And if he's honest with himself, the idea of having to be some kind of icon or getting the intimacies of his life put out on display for everyone to see and know about makes his skin crawl. He doesn't think it's about shame. He's _not_ ashamed. He just doesn't want everyone up in his shit.

He's never thought about fucking guys before John, and even now, there aren't any others. He'd be lying if he hadn't spent more and more thought on what it might be like to suck a dick, but it's always _John'_ s dick. He's not sure what that says about himself, if that's weird or normal or what.

Summer goes by. He settles back into the off-season routine with all the added notes he got from the trainers; he hires a skating coach to help him tweak his stride. All his friends and neighbors show up at some point and congratulate him on the Calder Cup, just like last year. It's great, though this year there's a lot more _but sorry about the Caps_ comments which inevitably end up tacked on, like a fly in the ointment. Last year's weren't as bad with the lowered expectations; this year's seem worse, though maybe he's reading too much into it.

 _Sometimes people are dicks_ , he texts John after it happens for the third time in a single day.

 _go pet a dog,_ John replies and then also sends back a picture of his dog lying across his legs. He looks like he's sitting on a lounge chair somewhere, concrete deck and bare feet sticking out with just an edge of blue swimming pool in the corner.

Karl's out jogging when he gets it, pushing himself to do an extra mile because he'd eaten way too much barbecue last night. It's a popular path and he'd just passed a woman who was walking five dachshunds at once, so he turns around until he passes her again, and then asks if he can take a photo of her dogs for his friend. He'd just meant to get the dogs, but the lady insists he poses with them, so Karl sits on the grass and gets a lapful of extremely good and friendly dogs who are all excited that he's sweaty and will let them lick him. It does cheer him up.

John sends back an entire row of laughing face emojis and says _nice weiners._

Even though he's stepped up his workout and training, he's not sleeping as well. At first he just thinks he's not doing enough, and he pushes even harder to tire himself out, but that just throws extra twinges and aches into the mix. By the end of July, his mother actually nags him into going to the doctor because she's getting more and more concerned about the dark circles under his eyes.

The doctor examines him (and congratulates him on the Calder Cup, making him autograph a poster about proper hand-washing technique), prods him in several unduly intimate places, declares him overall healthy and recommends an ear, nose, and throat specialist to check if he's got issues there. Karl spends another afternoon getting things poked into his sinuses, is told his septum is normal and not deviated, his nasal passages are clear, to not drink caffeine after three in the afternoon if he's going to bed at eleven, and then he gets bounced from there to an allergy specialist just in case. The specialist in turn makes him sit through the world's most annoying test that involves getting scratched on his arm repeatedly; he takes a picture of the mangled skin and sends it to John. The allergy specialist tells him to try cutting out gluten, alcohol, and sugar for one week apiece and seeing what happens, but that he seems otherwise fine and if he likes, the allergy specialist can send him back to his first doctor to ask about a sleep study.

Karl politely declines. When he checks his phone in the parking lot, John's sent him an OMG emoji, a selfie of John making a close approximation of the OMG emoji with his own face, and a picture of the golf clubs John apparently did end up buying.

It gets bad enough that he wonders if he should talk to the Caps about it, see if they want to tell him where to go and who to see. But then there's a night at the beginning of August where he lies on his bed and can't get comfortable, no matter what position he's in, shifting from his back to side to side. He has a headache. He's tired but he can't drift off completely, even though he hasn't had caffeine since noon and he ran an extra five miles after dinner.

The air conditioning is on but he feels hot and uncomfortable, sweating even under just the one sheet. He kicks it away, sits up, and peels off his shirt. He doesn't want to strip down any more than that while his parents are sleeping in the bedroom next door. At some point he's probably going to need to buy a place for himself, but his dad refinanced their house four times while he was growing up just to make they had the money for him to play, and he wants to get them squared away first.

Karl rolls over yet again, feeling his boxers drag against his skin. He feels damp and gross all over. Maybe he should take something after all; Benadryl won’t hurt him.

And then, even though he knows John is thousands of miles away, literally across two countries, he's not. John's _here_. Karl can feel it, feel him. _Smell_ him.

He gets out of the bed on autopilot and gropes for the light, and his legs almost buckle under him. The light goes on and he squints blindly in the brightness, tears springing out at the corners in reaction as he leans against the wall for support. He's sweating harder. It feels like there's a faucet turned on under his arms down his chest, into his groin, sweat just dripping all over. He's hot and he pats at his face and neck, trying to gauge his own temperature. Is he sick? Does he have a fever? He's going to explode out of his own skin; his heart is pounding, and it feels hard to breathe. He's too young for a heart attack.

But John, John, John's here. Karl would bet his life on it.

He moves in that direction that he feels, that his gut is being yanked towards like a magnet. It's the corner of his room where he shoved the last of his boxes he never unpacked from Hershey. He drops to his knees and tears mindlessly at the tape that's still running across then top; he rips a fingernail almost down to the quick and doesn't feel the pain.

When he gets the box open, it's like being hit by a physical wave. It's his bedding and a tangle of clothes that he hadn't bothered washing before packing away. Karl shoves both hands in and comes out with a corner of the blue cotton sheet in one hand and a dark brown t-shirt in the other. It has a 4, not a 7 on it. John's shirt.

Karl pulls the sheet and shirt all the way out, clutching them against his chest. He gets up and clumsily weaves his way back to the bed, still holding his armful of fabric. His hands are shaking. When he shoves the fabric of the shirt up against his face and closes his eyes, it's like John's right there.

He inhales it in through his nose noisily; he mouths the shirt, feeling it grow wet from his own saliva until he's actually biting it as well. John, John, this was on John. His tongue drags against the collar of the shirt and he shifts it around, sniffing for where he gets the strongest sense of John.

In the back of his mind, Karl's freaking the fuck out, but he can't put it down; all he can do is curl up animal-like in the sheets with John's shirt pressed to his face. He keeps gnawing at it, like he's a goddamn dog, like the shirt is John and Karl can taste his skin. He can't tell how long it's been, a minute? Ten minutes? Thirty seconds? His dick is achingly hard, and he can feel it tenting up against his boxers. Fuck, fuck. Every nerve in his body is alive and he's never been more awake.

Karl breathes open-mouthed for a minute because otherwise it's just too overwhelming. His heart is still pounding, and it feels like he's been skating hard, like he's been streaking up and down the ice in playoff OT. He can taste John, taste the miniscule traces of sweat that came from John's skin onto the shirt; it coats his tongue and the inside of his mouth. It's so messed up, and he doesn't even want to imagine what he looks like right now, some kind of fucked up pervert huffing away.

He bears down with his will and forces himself to pull the shirt away from his face, shove it away to the other side of the bed. He wants to pick it up again immediately, flooded with both guilt and want. He turns his head away, forcing his face down against his own pillow. But moving makes the loose sheet he pulled out of the box shift under him, and his dick gets even harder, if that's possible. Now he can smell both John and himself and the way it mixes.

He _wants._ It's like the heady rush from the championship party, and he fumbles for himself with one hand, the other shooting out to grab the shirt back and wad it against his face. He's leaked so much from the head of his dick and onto his boxers that it's almost as wet as if he'd already shot his load, but he hasn't yet, he can't. He squeezes himself and rubs his cheek against the cotton of the shirt like he's a kid and holding his old baby blanket for comfort again. It feels soft and cool against his skin.

Karl closes his eyes. He can't finesse or hold off, he just wants this over. He jerks himself hard, fist sliding up and down the shaft, the head poking up slick through the hole of his thumb and forefinger and then coming back down, still oozing precome. It's good, it's more than good, it's bliss. He's tries weakly to think about anything but John, feeling ashamed to put him in the middle of whatever crazy shit his brain and body are pulling on him, even just in thought, but he can't help it.

John, John, John. John in the locker room, whipping off his jersey and flopping on the bench in just his pads and undershirt. John's nipples poking out against the fabric of his undershirt in the cool air of the rink. John's arms grabbing him around the waist in a hug when they both scored in that same playoff game. John in a crouch, on all fours, head hanging down and hair in his face while Karl fucks into him from behind, one hand on his neck, John shoving back against him just as hard, wanting more, telling him to go harder, harder, fill him up, do it. John's on top of him, John's hands shoving his thighs apart, digging his nails into the muscle and pinning him down; John's mouth sliding down his dick and swallowing him into the wet heat of his throat. John on his back, leaning on his elbows while Karl has John's knees hooked over his elbows, John's head thrown back and coming all over himself in a complete mess.

John growling, John laughing, John crying, John moaning, John calling Karl's name across the ice, in his bed, somewhere back in New Jersey, John, John, John.

When Karl comes, it's an uncontrollable spasm, all of his muscles jerking, locking up, releasing, then tightening again as it shoots and drips out of him, no coordination whatsoever. He shuts his eyes during it and red light explodes behind them. It's like lightning, strike after strike, not ending. His toes curl, and one foot cramps, and it feels like he's lying in a goddamn swamp of his own jizz and like before, he doesn't care. The only thing that matters is milking out each pulse of pleasure through his fist, back arching up and wracked with the force of it.

It finally ends, the crashing waves of pleasure fading down into just ripples, and then stillness. He's alone in the room. He always was.

Now he's cold. Now every part of his body feels wet and tacky. He should clean himself off; instead he drags the whatever he can of the sheets and the blanket up over him to hold it all close and keep himself together. Oddly, nothing hurts anymore, at least not in the same way. He has no idea how to deal with what just happened, so he doesn't.

Karl falls asleep right away. He's still by himself. But it somehow doesn’t feel like it.

***

Karl's whole _thing_ is supposed to be defense. It's basically, like—everything. The whole point of what he does.

That said, he has absolutely none of it up and ready for when he finally gets to Washington and sees John for the first time since June, except for wearing his jock, cup, compression shorts, and a baggier pair of pants over everything because he's afraid he's going to pop a really obvious and ill-timed boner when he's actually with John again. If he could have gone around in his breezers all the time, he would have.

It turns out to be a good precaution anyway, because even though Karl gets into DC two days before John, even though he tried to prepare himself by jerking off with the shirt _twice_ the morning John gets in, it totally happens anyway.

He's standing near the front doors of the Kettler player entrance and talking with Mike Green and Matty P, who is no longer as scruffy as he used to be in the beard department but has some very suspect upper lip hair action going on. John turns towards Karl. The front of Kettler is all glass as well as the doors, and it fills the area with light as morning sun slices through the windows. John stands out in it, tall and dark, wearing a navy-blue shirt with the Caps logo as he shades his eyes with his hand, looking towards Karl. Then a cloud must be passing across the sun because the sunlight fades and the glass walls and doors turn opaque, reflecting like mirrors, and John is everywhere, everywhere.

"Hey, Alzy," John says, when Karl shows up. "I was waiting for you. Lookin' good."

And, boner.

After the first night he'd found it, Karl had rationed the shirt more cautiously. He stored it in a ziplock bag most of the time to keep it from getting mixed up with Karl's things, and he'd made do by stripping the bed, putting his still unwashed and embarrassingly stained apartment sheets on, then putting a clean set of sheets on top of that so to hide them. His mother had handed off his laundry responsibilities to Karl when he was thirteen and bringing home equipment that reeked so hard even the dog gave it a wide berth, so it wasn't too much of a danger it would be discovered, but still. Defense.

He slept much better for the rest of the summer. He didn't always jerk off, but when he did, he wrapped the shirt around his pillow like it was a pillowcase and it was better that way, easy to fall asleep with no headaches or any kind of pain.

"Hey," Karl says, and walks over to join them. "Good to see you too."

"You hear the announcement yet?" Matty P asks.

"It's not officially ready to announce yet, but Sergey wanted to make sure we all were prepped enough not to fuck it up," John adds. "I bet you twenty bucks he's already threatened Ovi about being naked, like, five times."

"What's not official?" Karl asks. "Who's naked?"

"What aren't we supposed to fuck up?" Matt Bradley asks, walking up as well. "Is Ovi naked around here?"

"I mean, maybe?" Greenie says. "Probably? Like, good odds, I guess. But no. It’s about the Winter Classic."

And that's how Karl finds out that HBO is going to be following them around with cameras to catch everything leading up to the Winter Classic, not just at the rink and at games, but at home and in their off time as well. 24/7. An unfiltered, mostly uncensored sorta-documentary about the Caps and the Pens and the personal lives of the players and coaching staff. And not just Ovi and Crosby; they want to get all of them out in front of the camera and the world.

 _Fuck,_ Karl thinks. He's really falling down on the whole defense thing. His timing could use some work, too.

Media day goes by in a blur, all of them being shuffled from place to place en mass, photographed and filmed, signing things until their hands cramp. He's never actually alone with John until they're headed for what'll be home from now on. They both have apartments in the same Courthouse apartment building, Karl on the first floor and John on the fourth. Remarkably convenient, all things considering.

"You want to come up?" John asks, when they both pull into the parking garage for the building. "I've got the X-Box set up."

"I should buy, like, actual food," Karl says. "I don't think I have anything in my fridge yet."

"Oh," John says. "Okay."

They both shift in place and then Karl says, "But I can do it later, I can hang for a while," at the same time John says, "Perry and Neuvy and a couple of the others were going to meet for dinner at Front Page if you want," and then they both try to speak over each other again, and then they do that stop-start-open mouth-wait thing that always happens.

"How many people at dinner?" Karl says. "What time?"

"I dunno," John says. "Just a bunch of people. Ovi's throwing a barbecue at his place tomorrow. I think the whole team is invited, but this is just, you know, to catch up tonight."

John's watching him carefully, almost warily. And Karl is acutely aware that this is the closest he's been to John all day. They haven't touched each other at all, not even the standard manly chest bump and back pat combo he's been handing out all day to various teammates. (Excluding Marcus Johansson, who had been unsubtly hiding behind Nicky whenever possible, and only emerged occasionally to shake hands with a terrified yet stoic expression, and Ovi, who can and does turn any hug into one that involves a lot of junk on junk contact.)

Ovi is actually who inspires him into action. Karl decides _he's_ going to be the one jumping up into the rush for once, and even though it's terrifying and he has no plan for what will immediately follow, he steps forward, grabs John, and hugs him. Completely hugs him, no half-assed gestures, and in the second it happens, he's transfixed with a surge of _something_ , a great wallop of sensation so intense he can’t identify it as pleasure or pain. He can hear himself gasp; he can feel the individual pressure and touch of each of John's fingers splayed against his back. John is panting just as heavily in his ear.

"Oh," John says in a stunned voice. "You too, huh?"

Karl can't do anything except nod. He can feel adrenaline coursing through him; he must have bitten his tongue as well because the inside of his mouth tastes like he's been sucking pennies.

"I think," he says carefully, "I'm not going to go grocery shopping yet."

Inside his apartment, they sit on the couch. Karl's leasing it fully furnished; everything is generically nice and adult-looking in a way that he's both proud and uneasy about, like he's going to spill something on it any second now.

"So, I guess," John says, and then rubs the back of his neck, still looking poleaxed. "Dude, I've had a cramp back there _forever_ , and now it's just gone. Like, as soon as we hugged."

"I had that," Karl says. "And like… sort of headaches? And I couldn’t sleep. During most of the summer. It started after I got home."

He feels fine right now. Better than fine, even. His head is clear, and nothing aches or hurts.

"Same," John said. "I thought I was going crazy, kinda. Or that I'd… like I thought somehow I had a concussion and didn't know it? And I didn't know what the hell I was going to tell anyone."

"It did get better," Karl says. He looks down at his feet. "There was. Uh. I had one of your shirts by accident? And touching it, like, that helped. But I didn't know. I just, there was one night and I was going through my shit and found it, and when I touched it, everything got better. Like when we just touched now, I guess."

That's glossing over a _lot_ , but he's still not sure where he and John stand on the whole acknowledgement of all the body fluids they'd swapped earlier in the summer, so.

John's grinning, though. "I stole your beanie," he says. "I was going to do a thing where I took pictures with it on stuff and see how long it took you to notice, but I just ending up wearing it. My parents thought I was nuts. They kept asking if they had the air conditioning on too high, why was I wearing a winter hat to bed? I had to tell them it was a hair treatment thing I was doing. I got so much shit for it."

"Jesus," Karl says and sniggers at the mental image.

After a few seconds, John looks serious again. "So, we both had weird headaches and stuff, and when we touch stuff the other one's touched, it's better. Or when we touch each other, like, say, this." He reaches over and pats Karl's thigh. Karl's boner makes another valiant attempt to escape its prison.

"It started right after the playoffs ended," Karl says. He focuses on the blank television screen so he doesn't have to see John's face. "The same night."

There is a long, long silence.

"Do you think we caused it by fucking?" John asks. He doesn't sound sarcastic. He sounds like he's genuinely trying out the idea.

"I mean, I don't know?" Karl says. "Can people do that? Like, maybe it's… I don't know. Bonding? Sorta?"

The third time after he'd jerked off with John's shirt, Karl had gotten on his laptop, set his browser to private, and googled variations on _why when we're not together i want to puke but not like the flu_ and he'd checked a bunch of Yahoo Answers that mostly made him lose faith in humanity. The closest he got to anything remotely what he was looking for was a Cosmopolitan article called _Sexy Science: How You And Your Partner's Body Chemistry Can Go Off The Charts!_ and a parenting website about how to bond with your newborn using skin on skin contact. Nothing was really helpful, but at least he wasn't the person asking how to get an electric toothbrush out of his ass without going to the hospital.

He risks a glance at John. John's face is all scrunched up in thought. Before he can look away, John meets his eyes.

"So, we boned and we bonded," John says. He furrows his brow. "Or we bonded so we boned? Chicken or egg."

"You're taking this way calmer than I thought you would," Karl says.

"I mean, I've read books where this happens a lot," John says, a little distracted.

"What the hell, you have?" Karl asks, sitting up so quickly he bangs his knee against the side of the couch. "What do you mean? Which books?"

"Shit, this happens all the time in books," John says. "Though I guess this sounds more like a soulbond instead of a horcrux. Though I can kinda see similarities for both."

John has a lot going for him that helps his general coolness reputation: several overtime game winning goals, good hair, an inexplicable immunity to getting chapped lips, and a natural resting stonerface expression. But that's for people who don't know about his crippling addition to the kind of YA lit that always has a cover with a dramatic close-up of some random backlit body part, surrounded by symbolic birds or butterflies or some shit. He has a serious weakness for love triangles and gets sulky as shit if he thinks the main character ended up with the wrong person, or if the dystopian setting has obvious scientific inaccuracies.

The second part of the Harry Potter movie isn't out until next year, but Karl's seen enough (and listened to John yammer about the book) to be able to say, "I'm not Wizard Hitler."

"Well, yeah, but we are kinda doing some of the same thing," John says, still frowning. "With the emotions and all. But you're right, it's not really horcrux-ish. It's more the soulbond thing." He drums his fingers against the couch arm. "Soulboned. I wonder if that's what we did."

"Wait, what, are you feeling my emotions?" Karl asks, and then decides to skip right past that to the more concerning part. " _Soulboned_?"

"I feel…" John takes a breath. "Yes? I think? I mean, it feels like you? You try it."

"How?"

John rolls his eyes and leans towards him. "C'mere."

Their shoulders brush together, and it's not at all like when they hugged, but it's almost like getting a static shock, and then John grabs his hand again and Karl d _oes_ feel it, something that's different but familiar. _John_. It's almost like listening to someone talk in the next room over and not being able to catch the words, just the tone. Or walking through a dark space but knowing where all the furniture is already.

"Wow," he says. He pulls back without moving, tries again, and it comes easier this time, especially if he leaves his hand in John's.

"Yeah," John agrees. He flops back against the couch, still holding Karl's hand. "So. I guess it would be a lot worse. At minimum, we gotta shake hands or swap a shirt or something every morning to make sure we're not getting any fucking backaches or whatever, and maybe if we experiment with this enough we'll get super powers. "

Karl thinks they should maybe be wondering why or how this happened, but as he opens his mouth to say so, he thinks he already knows what John would say, and that's—wow, weird, but also not bad. Shit, if they can use this on the ice, that would be amazing.

"I know, right?" John says, and there it is _again._ Like a glow.

Karl lets go of John's hand and leans back. Their legs are still pressed together, and they both sit there and stare at the ceiling for a few minutes. As he sits there, he realizes something else which seems startlingly obvious when he notices it, the same way all the aches he hadn't known he was nursing for so long had disappeared earlier, and it's that they've been just talking about fucking and maybe doing _more_ fucking and neither the world nor their friendship has ended.

They're all right. John even seems to be open to doing it again.

"Yeah," Karl says, suddenly happier than he's been in months. It just builds up inside him and it feels like John's but it also feels like his own. Everything seems lighter, brighter, nothing under his skin but sunlight. If he cut himself right now, all he'd do is shine.

Karl stretches his arms up in the air and then drops one arm deliberately down on the back of the couch behind John's shoulders.

"So," Karl says, and raises both eyebrows. "You said something about experimenting?"

***

They'd agreed to try and be smart about it, at least at first. They're sleeping in their own apartments at night, and _only_ sleeping.

"I mean," John says with a grimace, "it'd be kind of embarrassing if we got caught doing something before they nail Ovi. Like, seriously, I think Sergey hired an intern just to follow him around all the time with an extra pair of pants. Just in case."

"Ovi's going to take that for a challenge," Karl says. "He and Sasha were playing the pre-game two touch in their booty shorts again."

They keep it to just normal contact at first, but now Karl's hyper aware of just how much he and John apparently touch on a normal basis. Even handing things to each other becomes weirdly charged. _Charged_ is the word that applies in more than one sense; Karl starts thinking of the whole process like he's plugging in his phone or laptop, keeping them at high energy.

They fold it into a daily routine. Drive together to practice, drive together to games. They have a minimum of two meals together every day, and three more often than not. And every night, before John goes upstairs to the fourth floor, he walks into Karl's apartment's foyer first and stands there expectantly with arms out until he gets his hug, which John actually _choregraphs_ and gets crabby about if Karl doesn't use the right arm to grab him first. It seems unfair that _Karl's_ the only one saddled with the superstitious reputation when John's slapping at his bicep, insisting "right side first, asshole, c'mon, you know this."

Karl doesn’t need the shirt wrapped around his pillow to sleep anymore, but they swap some piece of clothing every other day or so anyway. It takes some adjusting—there're some heated arguments after a mustard incident involving a favorite Henley and the loss of a lucky hat, and since the roughly fifty billion shirts, sweatshirts, shorts, and so forth that the Caps issued to them all have their names and numbers along with the logo and make it obvious who the original owner is for each piece, they eventually manage to agree on a shared pool of their more generic wardrobe pieces.

It's an unspoken agreement that they're staying above the waist until after the HBO cameras are gone, to avoid slipping up. Jay, who get called up in the middle of December, seems confused by this.

"You guys are being super weird. Did you guys break up?" he asks, chewing on one of Karl's protein bars, with at least two more stuck in his pocket, because Jay will immediately commandeer any free food offered, even if he doesn't like it, just because it's free. Karl's pretty sure he's socking away his per diem by getting most of his meals out of their fridges. "This is why workplace romances are a bad idea."

Karl is saved from having to label and define the unique turn of life and John seem to be on, or what they were doing before, because John just snorts and throws a bag of granola at Jay. "Dude, my parents subscribed to HBO just so they could watch the whole thing," John says. "I think they told the entire parish about it. My _entire church parish_ is watching us on the fucking losing streak right now. Mom said the priest mentioned it in his sermon. The last thing I need is to add fuel to that fire."

"What he said," Karl says. But maybe Jay has a point, because being on the losing streak is shitty as hell right now; and it kinda sucks that they're being the ones cast as the sad sacks while the Pens get all the fun light coverage. He's not playing badly, but he can't help but wonder if doing something other than just swapping sweatshirts and putting his legs over John's when they sit on the couch and play video games together would help.

Winning was the impetus that caused them to get their dicks out the first time. It's just, they don't seem to be able to win at all right now. Maybe they should just get drunk again and see what happens.

Jay wraps up the rest of the protein bar and shoves it in his pocket, then he rips open the granola bag and pours it directly into his mouth.

"You're spilling all over the place," Karl says. "At least pour it into your hand, buddy."

"Collateral damage," Jay says. "Those aren't the good oats. The good oats stick together in a cluster. They're scrappier."

"Yeah, those oats aren't team players," John says. "It's okay to lose them, they're addition by subtraction."

Jay's the one who ends up fixing them though. They're in Ottawa and sniping at each other over the fact they've lost _eight fucking games in a row_ , for fuck's sake, and they're winding each other up in an emotional feedback loop of shared irritation. Jay breaks up their argument over which movie death involving a woodchipper is better, the one from _Fargo_ or the one from _Rumble in the Bronx_ (Karl's with _Fargo_ , and John says "I don't care, Jackie Chan's better, he does all his own stunts," and Karl says, "Jackie Chan doesn’t even get killed by the woodchipper," and John says, "Of course he fucking doesn't, he's the hero, you don't put the hero through the woodchipper!" and Karl says, "That is not even the fucking point, Jesus!")  and he tells them both, "Jesus Christ, shut up and go take a nap together, you big fucking babies, I can't listen to you anymore."

Karl does follow John to the bed just to spite Jay, even though John obstinately leaves his jeans on while napping just to spite Karl. And somehow in the two and a half hours they spend napping, even starting at opposite sides of the bed, they come together like a pair of magnets. Karl wakes up with his arm pinned under John, and John's hair in his mouth because his cheek is lying on top of John's head, feeling optimistic and refreshed. They win on the back of Matty P and Fehrsy scraping out the goals, and the entire locker room feels rejuvenated. Brooks throws on "Beat Dat Beat Up" and suddenly they're in business, and the whole narrative about teams having fun has a shift.

John scores a goal and an assist in their following game against Jersey, and after that they always nap in the same bed. It's even better than the clothes sharing and touching; two hours of rest feels like eight. And fuck Pittsburgh, they win on their big stage as 2011 stretches out in front of them, clean and shiny and full of potential.

Bruce has them all watch the remaining HBO episode together as a team in the video room afterwards. The cameras have all departed, but everyone's noisily happy anyway, knowing the way it ends. Right in the middle as they watch, John's hand creeps out on Karl's thigh and works its way upward steadily, stealthily, under the cover of darkness. It feels like a promise.

Karl's ready. What's more, he's hoping they get to experiment beyond what they did last summer. He's watched a lot of gay porn lately and is reasonably certain he can master those skills or adapt what he already knows how to do. Ignoring the storylines, the etiquette seems fairly simple to work out: lube, fingers first, and to always remember to provide a reach-around. Kissing is a little more ambiguous and seems to be affected by whether or not position and limb placement permit it.

Trying to figure out how to broach the topic has him less certain, but it's works out better than he'd expected. The first morning after all the cameras are gone, Karl wakes up from their nap and realizes he's poking John in the thigh with his hard-on, and before he can discreetly roll over and take care of it in the bathroom, John sleepily reaches down and grabs it, and they're right back to where they started.

Karl figures he'll start subtle, like grabbing his ass the next time John's rubbing off against him. He takes the opportunity to pass behind John in the same room whenever he can. When John's complaining about some muscle in his back being off (non-soulboning related; it's from getting slashed in the back three times on the same play in front of the net by Steve fucking Downie), Karl watches a youtube tutorial first to make sure he won't make it worse, and then gives him an hour-long back massage, letting his hands drift down John's lower back, quick pass over the dimples, and then back up.

The third time he does that, John just says, muffled into the sheets, "Jesus, dude, if you want my ass, just do it already, I can feel you thinking about it even when you're not pretending to not grab it."

"Not _now_ ," Karl says. "We have to play in a couple hours. But after, like, if you're okay with it," he adds quickly. "We could try it then. If you want."

John lifts his head, smirking. "You gonna do me that hard, Alzy?" he says. John eyefucks him a little and then drops his head back down with a snort. "Okay, sure."

Well, Karl can't back down from a challenge like that.

He uses their game that night against the Pens to psych himself up; he and John play over twenty minutes each since Greenie's out and hurt. They have a three-day break until their next game, and Karl spends the first day and a half of it carb-loading and drinking all kinds of smoothies and energy drinks from the trainers. After making sure he's got Gatorade, a couple takeout menus, and lube, he jumps John in the bedroom that afternoon instead of napping, tackling him onto the bed.

"Frisky," John says facedown into the sheets, in that same tone as before.

"Get naked," Karl tells him, and then doesn’t wait. He shoves until John rolls over on his back, and then he starts working on John's belt and has his pants already yanked down to midthigh before John has his own shirt off; he slaps at John's thigh and slides one hand under his knee to lift so he can get his right leg out, then the other. He'd made John take his shoes off at the front door as well, to avoid the whole pants over shoes issue from the very first time.

"I'm gonna swoon," John says, but he's getting hard already. There's a flush across his cheeks.

"Damn straight," Karl says, and pauses for a second to savor the view in broad daylight. John stays sprawled out flat, puts his hands together behind his head, and lets him.

"Don’t move," Karl says. He gets off the bed and starts undressing. John watches him just as avidly, and Karl takes his time the way he didn't when he was stripping John down. "Stay there," Karl says when he's naked.

He's put a lot of thought into this. He's thought so much about it, that there's a weird sense of déjà vu when he gets the lube out of the bedside table and gets back on the bed, settling in between his legs. "Tell me if I don't do it right," he tells John. "Tell me if you want me to stop or change anything in the middle of it, okay?"

"Okay," John says. His tongue darts out to swipe at his lips. "Do you want me to stay like this or turn over or what?"

"Like this for now," Karl says. "But later, maybe." He steels himself to feel ridiculous. "I'm gonna kiss you. And then I'm gonna jerk you as slow as I want to and look at your pretty face, and then I'm gonna suck your dick for a while. Then I'm going to finger you and open you up until you ask me to put my dick in you, and _then_ I'm going to fuck you into the mattress until you can't see straight."

John's eyes widen, and Karl gets ready to be laughed at, but then John tilts his chin up and says, "Well, you can talk about it or you can do it," and so Karl does.

Lying there in the aftermath, Karl thinks he might possibly need some kind of hip replacement/spinal disc realignment, but it was totally, totally worth it to see John all limp and blissed out and completely wrecked.

It takes a while before either of them is up for talking or moving, but John eventually opens his eyes and pokes Karl on the chest. "Where'd you learn to do that?" he asks.

Karl shifts enough so that he can put his mouth close to John's ear. "I read books where this happens a lot," he says, and then figuring he's not going to get a better line than that, shifts a little further and plants a soft open-mouthed kiss on the side of John's mouth. John shivers, smiles against his mouth, closes his eyes again, and his lashes dip down. It makes Karl think of butterflies, for some reason. Karl thinks about telling him this, about how pretty that is, but John's breath is evening out the way it does before he falls asleep, and Karl just keeps the observation for himself.

He feels the way he remembers from being young, at the end of special days like Christmas or his birthday, tired and just on the verge of being overwhelmed with happiness, struggling to stay awake as long as he could in order to keep soaking it up.

The next day, John comes back down around afternoon nap time again, and Karl meets him at the door right from the shower, towel still around his waist. "Good timing," he says, and heads back to the bedroom, John on his heels.

Once they get inside, Karl takes a steadying breath. John's standing near the bed a little uncertainly, fiddling with the hem of his shirt. Karl drops the towel, turns around, and throws the lube to John. He sits down on the bed. "Okay, fair's fair. You're up," he says. He flops backwards and waits.

John, as it turns out, was paying pretty good attention yesterday.

With everything that happens over the season—Flash getting traded, Beags coming up for good, the HBO cameras circling their every move, the losing streak, the winning streak, winning the Winter Classic in front of thousands of screaming people outdoors, the entire city of Pittsburgh wanting to burn them at the stake for it,  the run they go on to win the East by one point, him and John having their first full season and playing every single fucking game in the big leagues together… just, so much happens. 

Karl does remember it, and take it all in. He just does it while having a truly incredible amount of sex at the same time.

Just touching each other and swapping clothes kept them feeling fit and normal. Sleeping together for their naps recharged them and made it disconcertingly easy to read each other's vibes.  Having sex on a regular basis blows the roof off both the previous activities, and Karl thinks he understands what it must feel like for addicts.

It does affect how they play together on the ice, to the point where it's not just noticeable by them. Bruce is playing them as the unquestionable top pairing now, giving them the bulk of the defense's ice time. It feels like he doesn't even need to look to know where John's going to be; they shift position on the ice to be wherever the other one needs without even shouting.

It helps that the entire team is clicking now; they're having fun again. Bruce is jolly again. Ovi doesn't look like he wants to straight up punch anyone who asks him about his goal totals or Crosby's concussion as much anymore. Mike Knuble says that they've all grown as both a team and people, which is high praise from Knuble, who somehow became everyone's stand-in father figure practically overnight in 2009 in a way that seemed both mystifying and very natural at the same time. He could give Helmer a run for his money in Dad Strength.

They roar down a stretch of nine straight wins and feel invincible. They stumble here and there—Wideman goes down with the world's nastiest injury to his thigh; Varly and Neuvy both get hurt and Holts comes up for a couple games. But they keep winning, and John's and Karl's time on ice creeps up higher and higher. So they spend more and more time together, and if they're not in each other's clothes, they're out of them and in nothing at all, fucking in their road hotel rooms, in the shower, in their apartments on every piece of the rental furniture and once, memorably, in a supply closet at Kettler. Over the duration, they wreck John's best sheets, Karl has to buy more lube, and Jay accidentally walks in on them four separate times and is very emotionally damaged by it.

"I really wish you'd lock your doors," Jay moans from his kitchen table, where he has his head buried in his arms as he sits.

"I _did_ lock the door," Karl says. He puts on the sweatpants John tosses to him and ties the drawstring. "You _opened_ it. With a key. That I don't actually remember ever giving to you. And then you came in, and then you walked all the way through my place to my bedroom and opened _that_ door."

"Yeah, if you're going to just bust in like the Kool-Aid Man, you deserve what you get," John says.

"Why is he called the Kool-Aid Man if he's a giant pitcher?" Jay says, lifting his face from his arms. "He's not even shaped like a man. He's a giant piece of crockery."

"I mean, he does have a face," Karl says.

"Having a face doesn't make you a man," Jay says scornfully. "What actually identifies him as a man? He doesn't even have, like, genitals."

"That you know of," John says. "Have you actually gotten up close and personal with him?"

"Maybe the handle is his dick," Karl suggests. "Or the spout."

"Anyway, he has clothes now," John says. "He doesn’t just have the little arms and legs any more, they rebranded him. Now he wears pants and a jacket. And sneakers, I think."

"You know who isn’t wearing clothes and does have his junk just hanging on out?" Jay says. "You. Standing here. In the kitchen. People cook food here, you know."

John ignores him. "Look, check it out." He brings up a picture of the Kool-Aid Man on his phone. "Oh, wait. Apparently when they first created him, they called him the Pitcher Man. _'By the 1980s, the Kool-Aid Man had attained pop culture icon status. In 1983, he was the subject of two Kool-Aid Man video games for the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision systems. He was also given his own short-lived comic book series, The Adventures of Kool-Aid Man. This ran for three issues under Marvel Comics from 1983 to 1985_.'"

" _Two_ video games," Karl says. "And a comic book series. That's how you know you've made it."

John ignores him and keeps reading off his phone. "' _In 2009, the live-action character was reintroduced, playing street basketball and battling 'Cola' to stay balanced on a log, where he was voiced by Pat Duke._ ' I would pay good money to see the Kool-Aid Man dunking on a six-foot Coke bottle."

"Did the Cola character have genitals?" Jay asks.

" _'From at least 1979 to 1981, the character was known in Canada as Captain Kool-Aid'_ ," John reads out loud. "Why did you guys make him a Captain? Did he beat up the Canadian president?"

"We have a prime minister, dumbass," Karl says.

"Did the Kool-Aid Man beat up the prime minister?" John asks. "Or maybe he saved the prime minister's life and they rewarded him with a military title. Like the Queen can do over in England."

"Yeah, sure, that seems like it would check out," Jay says. "God, could you just put some pants on at least? Are you guys doing some weird sex bingo thing? Do you have a list you're checking off?"

Once again, Jay ends up accidentally helping them because later that night, John says, "Maybe we should make a sex list. You know, to see if the soulboning feels different depending on what we do."

Karl twitches inadvertently, the same way he does every time John says _soulboning_ , "You really think we're going to notice a difference depending on if my dick's up your ass or if I blow you the night before?" he asks.

"We might," John says. "I mean, we should probably do it for science."

And what the hell, why not. They get about four list bullets into a lined notepad before realizing that that might not be the best sort of thing to have lying around the apartments, and so Karl makes a spreadsheet on his computer that John immediately dubs the sex-sheet. In a fit of precaution, he saves it in a folder called "Nutrition Tracking", with a few decoy columns before it gets down to the good stuff. They have a good time making veiled comments about those, and now Jay looks vaguely suspicious every time they mention brown rice, salmon, peanut butter, or asparagus.

"So, how are we doing this," Karl asks. "By position? Degree of difficulty?"

"I thought this was supposed to be more like a bucket list," John says. "And then when we actually do it, we write down if we felt different or if you do something really unexpected like score a hat trick the next day or something. We can put stars next to them."

"Huh, why is it unexpected if _I'm_ the one who scores a hat trick," Karl says, and starts laboriously two-finger pecking away at the keyboard.

"I'm just saying," John says, and comes to stand behind him, leaning down and hooking his chin over Karl's shoulder. His breath tickles Karl's ear. "This might end up being the way we fuck all the way to the Cup."

"You should tell the marketing manager for the Caps to make that our t-shirt slogan for post-season," Karl says. "I'd buy one."

"I'll get right on it," John says. Karl can hear the smile in his voice, even if he can't see John's face. "I think we're gonna learn a lot. I think it's gonna be fun."

He's half right. When they finally get to the playoffs, they do, as it turns out, learn a lot.

***

How do girls do this, Karl wonders distantly, while on his knees in front of the toilet. If he didn't have short hair he'd be so fucked. Did they just hold it back by themselves with one hand whenever they have to puke? It explained the whole thing about them traveling in packs and always crowding into the bathrooms a lot better. Another wave of nauseating pain rolls over him and Karl dry-heaves, nothing coming out but a little bit of spit. Acid burns in his mouth.

Outside the stall, someone coughs, and then stops. Karl sits back on his heels and cautiously wipes his hand across the back of his mouth.

"I think I'm done," he croaks, and he hears steps coming closer. The door opens and Ovi and Jay are hovering there, both frowning.

"I got you some water," Jay says, and hands him a bottle with the top already cracked off. Karl takes it gratefully, swigs enough to swish around his mouth, then spits it out into the toilet bowl. He gets to his feet carefully, flushes the toilet, and steps out to join the other two. He aches all over, but especially on one side of his hip. It feels like someone just gut-punched him; the memory of the pain still queasily rests over his groin.

"Hendy's watching door," Ovi says, eyes still trained on Karl. "So, no one coming right now. Carly's still with trainers. Beags gonna go see him, tell him Backy gonna go hang in room and talk to him."

Jay makes a slight noise in his throat. "What about Karl?"

"I'm stay with Alzy," Ovi says. "We gotta talk about something, then we come. I talk to reporters already, don't need more. You see what Smitty and docs say, how long they be, if Carly gonna need help driving."

"I drove us," Karl says automatically. "We came to the game together."

"Okay," Ovi says. "Good." He gives Jay a light shove. "Go. This very important captain shit."

Jay goes, though he looks back over his shoulder dubiously. Karl can't blame him; Jay was right in Karl's path when he crashed through the locker room to get to the toilets so he could throw up. Since Karl had been giving a quote to Tarik about losing game one of this second round playoff series against Tampa Bay, and then thirty seconds later he was rushing to blow chunks, it must have seemed unexpected at best. He'll have to apologize to Hannan later; Karl's pretty sure he bowled him over as well. And anyway, he's partially thrown up on himself, since he'd only just gotten into the bathroom and passed out for a few seconds before being able to crawl to the toilet bowl and finish the job.

As soon as Beags is through the door and out, Ovi swivels his head and stares at Karl. His expression is impossible to read. "You and Carly, how long?"

"How long what?" Karl asks, cautiously. He turns on the faucet and starts dabbing at himself with a wad of wet paper towels to try and get any remaining puke off his pants.

Ovi's a good captain, no matter what the media narrative is. He doesn't stand up in the locker room and give rah-rah speeches on the regular; he'll happily hang out naked or the next thing to it in all kinds of public spaces; and he inflicts Russian techno music on the locker room at every opportunity possible. But he's not the dirty headhunter that he gets labeled as, and just because his English can be jumbled or less than eloquent doesn't mean he's stupid. He's having a shitty season by his own standards, but he still led the team in points and goals, and Jesus, it's not like 32 goals was nothing. Most players would punch a kitten to have a season with 32 goals. And Karl's seen Ovi getting his cortisone shots as well, and there was _something_ going on with his knee, not that McPhee or Ovi said shit about it. There's always more going on behind the scenes than people think there is.

But that's the thing with Ovi. Ovi's always in the open, never lurking out of view. If it draws attention away from the rest of the team, it also draws most of the fire away too, and that's a shield that none of them take for granted. They're not close-close, because Karl hangs with John and Jay and Matty P and Fehrsy and most of the other guys who've come up through Hershey. Ovi hangs with the other Russians and Europeans. Different worlds.

Ovi makes an impatient noise. "You know." Before Karl can tell him it's not really his business, Ovi continues. "How long you share bond?"

Karl gapes at him, and then shuts his mouth hastily. "We've been friends since we both started at Hershey," he says. "We played together down there."

Ovi gives him a _no shit_ look. "I don't say friends, I say bond. You know, with—" He waves his hands around slightly, trying to illustrate. "With fuck, and feelings, and you touch and make each other do better. You know what I mean. Don't pretend I mean just fuck, just friends. I mean, you and Carly, you have bond with…"

He trails off and looks like he's thinking hard, trying to move between two languages. "You and Carly connect here—" Ovi places one hand on his stomach, then lifts it to his heart, and then his forehead. "—and here, and here. You feel, like, emotions. You feel good. You share. Because you touch and stuff."

Karl leans against the sink. "How did you know?" he finally says. Then, "I mean, we always had chemistry, but it started for real like, last spring. After the AHL playoffs. Over the summer, we didn't feel good, and then when we came here for the start of the season, we found out that it fixed things if we touched a bunch or…you know, stayed together."

"Fucked," Ovi says, not really a question.

"Carly calls it soulboning," Karl says, and then winces.

But Ovi actually nods and looks like that's legit. "Oh, yes. Good. We use different word in Russia. Same thing, though."

"Seriously, how do you know about all this, where'd you learn about it?" Karl says, and then the lightbulb goes on and he blinks at Ovi. "Wait, seriously? You too? How much does this actually happen to people?"

If John's weird YA-lit-influenced romance bullshit is right, and it _does_ happen all the time, Karl is never going to hear the end of it from him.

But Ovi just shrugs, indifferent. "No, not lots. Different for everyone, too. Most people, you know, it's just good chemistry and play together? Don’t need to touch or be close together to keep from feeling sick. Or, you know, they make bond work without touch, though then bond doesn't help them play, feel good the same."

There are a thousand questions whirling through Karl's head, but the first one that comes out is, "Wait, so are you with Sasha or Backy?"

Ovi looks surprised. "You can't tell?"

"I mean." Karl tries to think of a polite way to say it. "No? Like, you're… you're friendly with everyone. Touching, I mean. And you hug everyone. And oh my God, you’re naked like all the time. And I've seen you and Sasha in each other's clothes. But you play with Backy. And also Sasha. And you and Backy wear the same stuff sometimes also, I know those are his leggings you had on the other day, so. But – look, just tell me. Wait, is it both of them? Can you even do that?"

Fortunately, Ovi just looks amused rather than offended. "Alzy, sometimes you smart, and sometimes not." He sighs, and the amusement bleeds out of his face. "We talk about Carly right now, though. If he hurt, you gotta be even more careful."

"What about him?" Karl croaks. He feels funny now; the pain has dwindled away, but his brain feels like there's a creeping fuzziness over it.

Ovi throws his hands up in the air in exasperation. "Alzy why you think you just run to the bathroom, puke? Carly got hit, he's hurt. Trainers probably do something right now to see how bad, that's why you go puke. You share all good stuff, you also share all bad stuff, idiot." He leans in and squints at Karl's face closely, then shakes his head. "And Carly probably get pain medicine right now, huh." He sighs. "We can't talk about right now, until both you more clear. Sit down, stay."

Karl obeys. He just wants to sleep. The loss sucked, but fatigue washes over him; he's tired and all he wants is to get in bed with John, get his bare chest against John's back, and sleep. After a while, Ovi comes back and gets his arm over his shoulder. "Come on."

He goes along without questioning and doesn't even register that he's being shoved into a car that isn't his. John's already belted in there in the back seat as well, blinking owlishly at him and looking completely out of it. Karl slides across the back until he's in the middle seat, right next to John. He fumbles with the buckle until someone does it for him, looks up, and realizes he's in Jay's car.

"My car," he tries to say.

"Beags gonna drive you your place," Ovi says. "You all drive to practice tomorrow, get your car later. Give me keys. Go sleep. We talk tomorrow."

It's a sense of déjà vu so strong, Karl blinks at Ovi. The playoffs aren't over yet, they're still beginning. But he thinks of last year and the Bears and Helmer and it all blurs together. The car starts to move and Karl just doesn't try to stay awake any longer. John's next to him. John's here. It hurts, but John's here. He dozes, and then he's being prodded out of the car, onto something soft, and falling down a dark slope of sleep.

Karl wakes up with a tentative hard-on, which is normal, John drooling on his shoulder and poking him in the thigh with a hard-on, which is also normal, that weird slightly hungover feeling that he gets after taking any kind of codeine which is both normal and not normal since he didn't actually remember taking anything, and with Jay, Ovi, and Nicky all standing around his bed silently and staring down at them, which is definitely not normal and pretty goddamn creepy to boot, even if there are no hard-ons involved, at least that he can see.

Karl opens and closes his eyes, waiting to see if they'll oblige him by disappearing. They don't.

"What," he says groggily, "fuck? What are. I mean. What the fuck? You? The fuck are you doing?"

"Nice apartment," Nicky says.

"Time for practice," Ovi says. "And also for special talk."

"You're out of juice," Jay says. "And you need a better couch. And Ovi and Backy just showed up and I don't know what's going on with you and John right now but I'm really curious."

John, only semi-conscious, seems to rouse a bit upon hearing his name, snuffling into Karl's shoulder and groping around vaguely for Karl's dick. Karl swats at his hand because public sex of any kind isn't currently on the sex-sheet; John makes an unhappy, dick-denied noise. He rolls away and takes the blanket with him, baring Karl to the room at large. Jay makes an unhappy dick-encountering noise. Karl blinks at all the teammates congregating in his apartment and decides life has just become incredibly surreal right now.

Someone from the Capitals staff apparently got his car back and has it waiting at Kettler for him. Practice is light and half of them are getting medical treatments anyway. Mike Knuble's hand is a mess. John doesn't skate much, but he can walk around at least, though there's a hesitance to it that Karl can feel like a ghost in his own steps.

After it’s over, they all end up at Ovi's place: Ovi, Nicky, John, Karl, and Beags, who despite his complaining still refuses to be left out of what's going on. So Ovi orders an obscene amount of pizza, plops himself down next to Nicky, and drops the second worst sex-related lecture of Karl's life on them over the next forty five minutes.

At the end, they all sit there for a while in silence. Jay, glancing at both John and Karl, raises his hand.

"So, to summarize," he says. "Carly and Alzy have a wacky soulmate connection that they've been controlling with sex and a lack of personal boundaries, but in the process of playing around with it and being sex maniacs, they just sorta supercharged themselves up so they're way too connected right now and instead of just being all Carlzner and chill, they're also doubling each other's pain by feeling and sharing that back and forth too."

"Yup," Ovi says.

"That's good," Nicky says. "Nice work, Beags."

"Thanks, I went to college for two years," Jay says. "Also, apparently you and Ovi have the same weird soul connection thing and are also probably doing things with each other I don't want to actually see. I mean, I'm assuming that. And that it's actually your soul, and not just, like, freaky brain and sex hormones. We can come back to that, though. So, how'd they get this thing? Why?"

"Most people who get it, it activates with sex, so that is how. Why? Who knows?" Nicky shrugs. "It's a mystery. Sometimes things just happen. Maybe it is brain hormones."

"That's bullshit," John says, finally joining the conversation. "That's, like, if you read that in a book, that's terrible narrative structure. Also, it’s _soulboning_. I just think this is the best word for it."

"Life's not book," Ovi says. "Life's life. Shit happens."

"You need to learn balance," Nicky says. He glances over at Ovi and nods his head. "Means, control how much you share, so that when you need to feel more or pull back, both of you don’t crash."

"You both lucky," Ovi says. "You both healthy, not hurt until now, so you just shared good stuff."

"What do you mean with balance?" Karl asks. "Do we need to, like, change our diets or something?"

Nicky looks over at Ovi again. Ovi looks back at him. They look like they're having a silent conversation, and Karl wonders if the rest of the team sees that when he and John are together. In retrospect, Ovi was right; Karl is kinda dumb. The ten and thirteen-year paired contracts really kind of give it away, when you think about it.

He has a bad feeling about this in the pit of his stomach, and then he realizes that might be John as well, and the discomfort grows.

"It's not gonna be easy," Ovi finally says. "Not fun, too."

"It can be okay, though," Nicky says.

Can be. Not will be. That's telling, in and of itself.

And so then, Ovi tells them.

***

Nicky always throws the team's Super Bowl party, and apparently being concussed indefinitely is not going to change his tradition. Karl's having a pretty good time, all things considering, when he suddenly sees Jay coming for him with that determined look on his face and knows it means trouble. He immediately looks around for escape routes, but just like trying to navigate an actual Ikea, Karl gets hung up trying to get around the massive leather _Kivik_ section, and he fails to escape in time.

"I've got a new set of ideas for you and Carly," Jay says, boxing him in by stepping around the tasteful _Hemnes_ coffee table.

"Goddammit," Karl says.

"I know you said to rule out anything involving cannibalism," Jay continues, "but this isn't _technically_ cannibalism. It's not really eating. It's more like blood drinking. It's actually, like, exactly blood drinking."

"We're not talking about this," Karl says.

"If you don’t want to drink any blood, that's fine," Jay says, mulishly. "I started with that one because I knew you were going to reject whatever I said first."

"Oh my God," Karl says in despair, and then lunges forward and grabs Jay's arm, dragging him away from the couches. "Kitchen, c'mon."

In the kitchen, which is empty and abandoned while everyone else watches the waning moments of the game, Jay opens another one of the gluten-free beers Karl brought and takes a slug, eyeing Karl curiously. "Did you actually want to hear what I have to say, or was this just so no one else would hear us? Because I do have a couple of ideas that I think would work."

"Beags," Karl says, and then switches tactics. "Jay," he says gently, "I know you're trying to help. I appreciate it, I really do. But you don't need to. Carly and me, it's working. We're doing okay. I mean, we've played every game, right? And we only have a couple months left, we can totally make it."

Jay sighs. "But you shouldn't have to, and you might not have to if you'd just try," he says. "I know you guys say you're fine, and yeah, you're playing okay _now,_ but over the summer, and when the season started, you guys were… it was bad. You guys looked bad. And just because you guys are doing this year-long chastity thing to reset your whole soulboning thing—" 

(Karl twitches, because after all this time he still can't help it.)

"—doesn't mean you can't at least hear me about some of the totally not completely unlikely things I researched while I was concussed to help fix you guys faster."

"We're fine," Karl says. "Dude. We just can't… fuck. Or touch as much. The yoga and the meditation stuff make a difference, and we're both healthy. It’s not bad at all anymore. We swap shirts, we hang out. Ovi and Backy have it way worse than we do right now, with Backy's concussion."

Jay looks completely unconvinced. "Why'd you only sign a two year contract this summer if you’re so fine?" he asks. "You could have gone longer."

"Because I don’t have anything to bargain with for getting a longer one?" Karl says. "Shit, I'm not an UFA. I don’t put up points like Greenie and John do. The bridge was what I always expected."

Not true, not exactly. If he'd really wanted to, Karl could have let the team lowball him and maybe gotten an extra two years, but he has to be careful about that. Ovi and Nicky would have had McPhee doing his best to marry them to DC and each other on the basis of their natural talents even if they only had normal chemistry.

There's a massive roar inside the living room, as something big has apparently just taken place in the game. Karl flinches again and can't help but wince and rub at his temples in discomfort. Jay notices.

"Guessing from the looks of that," he says, nodding at Karl's gesture, "that whatever happened just now didn't go so well for John's team and he's pissed."

Karl shrugs. "Nope. But it's not as bad as it was."

Nicky comes into the kitchen, holding the remains of a plate of nachos and several empty bottles. "Giants scored," he says. "Patriots are in trouble."

"I think Carly and Alzy should get significant matching tattoos and mix each other's blood into the ink and see if that helps them with their detox issue so they don’t have to wait until April or longer to see when they can safely fuck each other again, Backy, what are your thoughts," Jay says to Nicky.

Backy doesn't even blink. "Won’t work. Ovi knows someone, he's leading tattoo expert in Russia and it’s mostly just nonsense. And blood transfusions are too risky."

"Okay, you know those women who have their own placentas made into pills and take them after they give birth? What if they each jerk off into a cup—"

"It just takes _time_ ," Nicky says. "It's more important that they completely balance out, get all of last year out of their systems, and then going forward they'll be fine."

He pats Jay's shoulder. "It sucks. But it could be lots worse. They're on the same team and they can still be around each other, and they're playing well."

Karl has to look away because even though Nicky's face and voice give nothing away, he knows exactly what's going on beneath that mask of calm. Ovi's misery is palpable most days, much more obvious on his face and in his play, and he and Nicky were mostly balanced out to begin with. He barely even bothers to come up with retorts to the media circling him like vultures; he just mouths the kind of canned responses that don’t require effort, and trails around after Nicky like he can't bear to let him out of his sight.

Nicky's voice breaks into his thoughts. "Don't look like that, Alzy," he says. "I'm getting better."

"Backy's best," Ovi says, coming into the kitchen on the swell of another roar of noise from the living room. The game must be over. "You gonna be fine soon. Then we play together again, maybe even see Coach Hunter smile. His face maybe crack."

Ovi walks over to where Nicky is and casually slings an arm around his shoulders for a brief pat. It's barely anything, and by Ovi standards it's probably chaste as hell, but Karl is so jealous of that casual intimacy for a second that he can't even think, and he has to close his eyes and visualize letting it melt away like snow before he accidentally pushes all that negative emotion to John.

"Yeah, well," Jay says. "You guys know best. But check your email, I sent you something," he says to Karl. "I think you'll like it."

"Sure," Karl says. People are beginning to trickle into the kitchen, cramming napkins and plates into the trashcan and leaving glasses in the sink. "Guess everyone's taking off?"

"Alzy, you better go get your boy," Brooks says, dumping bottles in the recycling bin. "I don’t think he's blinked since the middle of the fourth quarter. Don’t let him cut his wrists in the bathtub tonight."

Karl forces a chuckle, and then heads into the living room. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Nicky lean closer and whisper something quietly to Ovi before picking up one of the full trash bags and heading towards the garage, and he sees Ovi's eyes follow Nicky. He doesn’t consider himself particularly religious, but there's something about Ovi's expression that makes him think of churches, and saints in stained glass with their faces tilted upwards and their eyes watching God.  

Karl can't remember being in a church in a while. This might be something John must've seen once and told him about it, or that Karl picked up from him last year. Or maybe it really is his own memory and he's just shit at it.

On the couch, John is slumped down so far he's almost sliding off. He's talking in a low monotone to Jeff Halpern, who seems torn between awkwardly patting John's shoulder in "there-there" fashion, and trying not to laugh.

"…and it's all about the reputation and the way it mentally plays on opponents. Every Super Bowl that the Pats play in and win just adds to it. It gets them in the heads of their opponents. They know their history. They know the Pats can pull it out." John sighs, a breath that seems to deflate him even further. "And this is why Eli Manning always kills us. He’s just too stupid to feel pressure, you know?"

John is remarkably thoughtful and mellow about everything except NFL football and quarterbacks; in a locker room debate on those topics, he'll be screaming something about "RINGS, MOTHERFUCKER!" at someone else within two minutes. Karl can set his watch by it. He doesn't understand why John loves the Patriots so much, but he lives with it.

"Okay, buddy, that's enough of that," Karl says. "Let's get you home."

Jay's there now, and he helps Halpy pull John to his feet. "Is he drunk?" Karl asks, keeping his hands in his pockets so he won't do anything by mistake.

"I'm fine," John says gloomily.

"He's fine," Halpy says. "Just depressed. Tomorrow's another day, kiddo."

"I'll drive," Karl says. He heads towards the car and doesn’t need to look back to know John is following him.

Jay ghosts his way out of the dark, walking up next to him. "You need me to come along?" he asks quietly.

Karl shakes his head. "No. I'll drop him off and go home."

"Okay. See you tomorrow," Jay says, and walks on. After a few steps, though, he turns around and calls back. "Seriously, check your email!"

It's probably another terrifying suggestion list. Beags seems to have taken the whole thing almost harder than John and Karl had, and keeps trying to think of ways to get around it and either cheat the no-sex-or-touching rule or magically fix things. These have included but aren't limited to the idea they wear necklaces filled with vials of each other's blood and hair and fingernail clippings, jerking each other off while wearing rubber gloves so no actual contact is made, and hiring a guy he knows who's into voodoo.

The ride back is quiet. John's still living in the apartment complex, and Jay lives there too; Karl's nearby, but in a townhouse now, courtesy of his new contract. Karl should just drop John off. He drove them to the party and had expected John to be tanked in celebration by the end of the night. He'd let Beags know in advance he might even need him to help out, in case John passed out and Karl needed someone to help physically manhandle him back to his place, or if Karl ended up getting drunk by proxy and also needed a driver. Beags would step in without question.

Just a few more months. They just need to make it a few more months.

Ovi had outlined it in simple, blunt terms last year. Detox. Reset. Reboot. No sex, and very minimal touching, keep themselves level and mostly pain-free by going back to just swapping clothes that the other had worn and being in each other's company. But very little else.

"Is this a joke?" John had asked. "Like a 'ha ha ha prank the rookie' thing?"

"It's not," Nicky had said. He'd looked down at his hands. "Ovi and me, we had it similar. Sometimes, you just overload. Not because you had sex a lot, that didn't make it happen. But you have to learn control. Or you just…" he trailed off.

"You can share too much," Ovi had said. "Bad stuff. Bad stuff other person can’t handle or it go back and forth, you two pushing, trying to get rid of, and then don't know what’s your brain, your thoughts, and what's other person."

"But touching each other was what fixed us last time," Karl had said. "During the summer, we both would have been in serious shit if we didn't have the clothes and when we finally touched when we came back to DC."

"It works, but it maybe gets bad, you get too—" Ovi had fumbled for the word. "Too much lean? Depend. Too much depend on it, and then you can hurt other person. Like being drunk. Maybe you come touch Carly because you completely out of brain, maybe you think you being nice and sweet to him but he doesn't want. But you think he does. Or Carly do that to you, hits you because he angry and then him touching you makes it more bad, and you fight and don't stop."

The words had been jumbled but Karl had read between the lines. There was something else there, some painful story or experience he didn't know and didn't think he had the right to know. But Ovi and Nicky were still playing with each other on the ice and touching each other off it without hesitation, so maybe it wasn't as bad as it hinted. It certainly hadn't broken them apart for good.

Even if he hadn't wanted to believe them, he'd felt it again on the ice the next day: John's hip injury as he played injured, echoing into Karl's senses. He could feel it in John, and his own body thought it was his. John played through the pain and Karl played through John's pain, and between that, and some shitty luck in OT, and a whole other slew of injuries, they went out with a whimper to Tampa in four. Swept. Not a single fucking win.

Breakdown day had happened quickly. John had showed up at his apartment, though, with an armful of clothes.

"Swap me," he'd said. "And text me your address. We can mail stuff back and forth. We're gonna have almost four months not even being in the same country, so it's gonna be close to cold turkey, but we can at least keep an okay baseline."

"Okay," Karl had said, not even trying to argue because what else was there to do, really?

 He'd pulled out a box to put them in, then gotten an idea and started rolling the clothes up tight in ziplock bags before putting them in the box. "This way they seem like you for longer," he explained to John's questioning look. John had nodded and gone over to Karl's closet and clothes hamper to start doing the same thing.

Summer hadn't been easy. It wasn't as physically hard as last year, but he missed John on some aching bone-deep level that wearing or holding his clothes didn't come close to fixing. Not even jerking off with them was the same—he'd managed to get Nicky aside and ask about that, in one of the more awkward conversations he's ever had with Nicky. Ovi had responded to his text and said it was fine, but Nicky's the one that Karl figured he'd take for gospel.

He'd trained. He'd negotiated with McPhee, signed his contract, and marked the days off. And summer hadn't been easy, but once he was back and John was right _there_ and they were on the ice together again was several magnitudes of worse.

That was when Karl bought his townhouse and moved. John hadn't talked to him for a week, because Karl didn't tell him he was doing it until the day after he closed.

The whole team was out of sorts again, after starting 7-0. Jay'd been out of commission with his concussion, thanks to Arron Asham, that walking sack of shit. They'd stumbled along until Thanksgiving, and then Bruce got canned and McPhee'd brought in Dale Hunter. And just when things started looking a little better, Nicky took an elbow to the jaw and now they're back to scrabbling desperately to stay in the wild card spot.

There's still time. They can do it. But it's an uphill climb, and Karl thinks sometimes that it's not worth it, none of it is, and he'd quit and retire today if he could just kiss John _once._

"You gonna turn the car off?" John asks, and Karl realizes that he's driven them on autopilot to his own townhouse instead of the apartment building.

"Shit," he says. "Sorry, I was zoned out."

John shrugs. "I can crash on your couch."

"I have a guest room," Karl says. "Besides, I have that hoodie you wanted back. C'mon."

The remnants of old snow crunches under their feet, and the sound of Karl's key scraping in the lock sounds overly loud in the night. John follows him in, silent as a ghost. Karl starts flicking on lights right away and talking, trying to fill the spaces.

"I was gonna paint the place. I went to Home Depot though, and you wouldn't believe what a pain in the ass it is. Like, there's fifty million shades of everything and they all have these weird names like 'Song of Summer' and 'Flamingo's Dream'. There was even one called 'Bagel'. And the guy kept trying to sell me on accent walls. Like, if I don't have an accent wall, apparently the whole place will look like crap."

"Yeah?" John says.

"Yeah," Karl says. "In Appletini. That was the color he kept pushing."

"Good times," John says. He's drifted over to look at Karl's wall of pictures, most of them mounted in random frames.

"Jay helped me put those up," Karl says. He's afraid to stop talking. "He saw me do a couple of them and yelled about how I hadn't even used the stud-finder to see if I was mounting them on just the drywall or what. He came back the next day and basically just did them all for me."

"I like them," John says, but he's staring at one patch of wall in particular, and Karl knows even before he follows the line of his eyes. One team shot of the 2009-2010 Bears team on the ice after the Calder win, and one of just him and John together on the ice, arms slung over each other's shoulders and grinning like idiots in their sweat-soaked jerseys and baseball caps, roughly eight hours away from starting what has them standing in silence together now.

"I miss you so fucking much," John says conversationally. "I know we're almost there, and I don't want to fuck this up now but fuck, I miss you. I miss kissing you, even when you have the beard going on. I miss taking showers with you, even when you hog the spray. I just want to jump you, like, all the time."

"I miss you too," Karl says. He puts out his finger and touches the face of John in the picture under glass. "It's hard having you be this close but still having to be careful. Like, letting someone else start the goal hug first."

"Jay kept telling me over the summer that we should try phone sex," John says. "Not like him and me, me and you, obviously. He sent me links to Cosmo articles about how to get started."

"He told me I should send you more dick pics," Karl admits.

"Well, you _should_ ," John says.

"Hey, you should have given me some nasty phone sex," Karl says.

"I almost did when I saw the thing about your contract over the summer," John says. "I dunno, but. It's not going anywhere until this summer probably, but McPhee's been talking to my agent about my next contract. They gave me a couple different options to look at. Like. Different numbers, different year lengths, you know. Depending on how many years I'm willing to give them."

"How many years are you willing to give them?" Karl asks, turning a little. John's already looking at him directly.

"I'm in for the long haul," John says. "As long as I know I'm wanted."

Karl leans in and breathes in the air John was just breathing out, and then he holds it, holds John in his lungs and all through his veins, hold's John's gaze with his own.

"C'mon," he says and walks towards the guest room. "Go sit on the bed."

John's already beginning to smile as he walks by. He takes of his shirt once he's on the bed.

Karl stays where he is, standing in the doorway. "What are you wearing?" he says. He puts his hand up next to his face with his pinky and thumb sticking out and the other fingers folded down, holding it by his mouth and ear.

John raises an eyebrow at him. "Oh, you know," he says, hands still working on his belt and jeans. "A red lace nightie, garters, black fishnet stockings, and four-inch spike heels."

"That doesn’t sound very comfortable, baby," Karl says. "Maybe you should take some of it off."

"Oh, I guess so, but what about you, big boy," John says. "What are you wearing?"

"You're not going to believe this but I'm _also_ in a red lace nightie, garters, black fishnet stockings, and heels," Karl says as John snorts in an explosive burst of laughter. "Mine are six-inch heels, though."

"Ooooh," John says, grinning. He's naked except for his boxers now, and he flops on the bed and holds his hand up to his face in phone imitation the same way Karl is. "And are you real lonesome tonight?"

"Not when I'm talking to you," Karl says. "I keep thinking of all the things I'm doing to you."

"And what're you doing to me?" John says. He sticks his hand down his boxers and starts lazily groping himself. Karl can already see a small, wet patch of darkness on the fabric where the head of his dick must be pressing against it.

"I'm pinching your nipples," Karl says, watching John's other hand reach up and brush across one nipple in response. "Oh wow, you never told me you had a piercing there."

"I'm full of surprises," John says. "Like how I just bit your earlobe in gentle yet sultry fashion."

"How did you bite my earlobe if I'm pinching your nipples?" Karl says.

"You're ruining the mood, Alzy," John says. "Don't break character."

"You know what, my bad, you're right," Karl says. "Forget the nipples. I'm bringing out a jar of edible body paint. It's strawberry flavor and there's glitter in it. Your chest is an erotic masterpiece that could be displayed in the National Gallery, right next to the Picassos. As you turn over, I realize that truly yours is a butt that won’t quit."

"Oooh, baby, ooh," John says. "I'm moaning. I'm totally horny over here for you. Stick it in me, we don't have time for foreplay. Oooh, yeah."

"You know what, this is probably why neither of us tried phone sex over the summer," Karl says. "Plus, phone sex scenario me would be a real asshole if he did just skip the foreplay."

"That's okay," John says. "I'm a shitty phone sex operator because I should be trying to get you to stay on the line for every single minute I can keep charging you 6.99."

"Nice," Karl says.

"Right?" John says. He stops groping himself, sits up on the bed, and stares at Karl seriously, all the fun in his face sucked away so fast it almost makes Karl dizzy. "I know this sucks," he says. "But it's worth it. It's worth waiting for. To me, you're worth doing all this."

"You're worth anything. Everything," Karl says, and fights not to drop his eyes. If John can be brave and not embarrassed, so can he. "I love you. I was kinda hoping I'd be able to tell you in a better moment, but I also figured you knew already. But in case you didn't. So. Yeah. I love you."

"I love you too," John says. "That's how I knew we can do this. And yeah, I knew."

"Oh," Karl says. He can't seem to think of anything else to say. He can't seem to stop smiling. "I'm glad."

"So, yeah. That's okay. We're okay," John says. "Go to bed. We're going to kick ass tomorrow."

"Why, what's happening tomorrow?" Karl asks.

"Us," John says, and his smile matches Karl's. "For the rest of our lives."

"Oh," Karl says one more time, too happy to try and think of anything eloquent. "Well, good."

In his own bedroom, as he's setting his phone alarm for tomorrow, he sees the email from Jay's notification at the top of his phone. When he opens it, there's just a link to what looks like some fanblog. Clicking it brings him to a link in the blog's online store and he doesn’t understand until the picture of the shirt loads. It's red and has CARLZNER emblazoned across the chest.

Karl grins. He clicks and navigates until he buys two. Then he reconsiders and goes back to buy a third. Jay might want one for himself. He puts the phone down so he can brush his teeth.

When he gets back to his bed, the phone pings again. Karl reaches out and unlocks the screen as he's crawling into bed. It's a text from John, and opening it makes him almost drop the phone on the covers because the picture attached is of John's dick peeking out from a pair of dark gray boxers.

_I thought Id make Jay happy and take his advice_

_Just making sure you have something good to fall asleep to._

_< 3 <3 <3 ,3_

_Ignore the last heart hes not a team player_

Karl grins and texts back a selfie of him making an exaggerated pucker at the camera.

_Kisses_

_Beags gives good advice sometimes. Don’t tell him I said that._

_I just bought you a present by the way_

He can actually hear John's phone pinging across the hall. His phone pings back.

_Aww baby your too good to me. What is it?_

_I'll show you in the morning. Btw I love you,_ Karl texts and turns the lamp off. His phone pings one more time, and the response makes him smile, even as he reads it.

_I'll be there.  Cuz we're soulboned._

_Love you too._

**Author's Note:**

> Written as kiiiiiiind of a take on the prompt, "Karl Alzner/John Carlson. Loving each other no matter how far apart? Tbh I would love constant mentions of them being joined at the hip and their ~portmanteau~ and all their commercials and whatnot together." 
> 
> Hope you enjoy! Thanks for your prompt; I had a lot of fun writing this and revisiting all the classic Carlzner material out there. Sorry that they weren't completely mature and adult and without communication woes, but I hope you'll forgive me, given the time period it's mostly based in. There's an accompanying Backstrom/Ovechkin piece with their side of the story that I owe you someday.
> 
> For closest accuracy, you should probably imagine any variation on the word "soulbone" to be said in the same tone Raymond Holt uses to say "bone" on Brooklyn 99.


End file.
